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Personalization is a trending word in education — but it’s clear that the word means very different things to different folks.

In their terrific new book, “Students At The Center: Personalized Learning with Habits of Mind,” Bena Kallick and Allison Zmuda outline the most important attributes of personalization. As they talk about these attributes (voice, co-creation, social construction and self-discovery), what’s clear is that true personalization requires increased levels of student engagement and teacher feedback.

All too often, educational technology products claim to be personalized – but all they really mean is that a student can go through a pre-ordered sequence of lessons at their own pace.

Bena and Allison talk specifically about portfolios and exhibitions, and they note it isn’t enough for students to collect work or to “engage in superficial reflection.” Rather, portfolios can be powerful tools for personalization when students “play a much more prominent role in assessing their own work,” when they use the portfolio to set goals and “decide on next steps” and can “learn to describe themselves … in richer ways than ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at something.”

If you’re looking to take steps to become more personalized, Bena and Allison provide a terrific framework. It also builds on earlier work on personalization like Joe DiMartino and Denise Wolk’s “The Personalized High School” and Allison’s own Learning Personalized – in both book and blog form.

A portfolio should be more than a collection of student work. For a portfolio process to be useful, schools need to have a purpose for putting the work in place.

Simply putting student work into an online folder doesn’t do very much. Without a purpose, what you have is a digital scrapbook – a random collection of work that isn’t organized in any meaningful way.

There are many useful purposes for a portfolio, including:

Conferencing with parents about student achievements

Demonstrating how a student has grown over time

Demonstrating how student work is linked to standards

Connecting what students are doing in school with their college / career goals

Keeping track of all the steps in a student project (like a science fair exhibit or a capstone project)

Each of these purposes helps students figure out what they need to collect into the portfolio. For a parent conference, maybe we want to see show progress in reading and math – and any special skills the student has demonstrated. If we tie the portfolio to student goals, then the student can start making connections between classwork and what they want to do after high school.

As you explore the work with portfolios, having a purpose in mind can help focus what teachers and students are collecting.

What should a student know and be able to do? When you think about your students at the end of the school year, what do you hope they have learned?

Your expectations can help you organize your portfolios.

For example, in a typical language arts class, students should be able to demonstrate how well they can read, write, speak and listen. You may have specific expectations, based on the standards adopted by your school; you might also have expectations that make sense for your individual students.

Whether you call them expectations, or standards, or competencies, your vision of what students should know and be able to do can guide your work.

1. Start by listing your expectations: “every student in my class, by the end of this school year, will be able to:____”
2. Next, think about your assignments. What are some of the performance tasks that will allow students to demonstrate their skills?
3. Finally, link your assignments to the expectations. When the students complete the project, or essay, or report (or any other assignment) that you listed in question 2, what expectations will they demonstrate?

When you think about the assignments for the portfolio, this process can guarantee that your students will have enough opportunities to meet all the competencies. For example, the language arts teacher will want to make sure that students can show their skills in reading, writing, listening and speaking sometime during the year.

One of the most common questions schools ask about portfolios is, “What goes into it?”
It helps to start with a couple more essential questions – “What is our purpose for the portfolio?” and “Who is our primary audience?”

Most of the time, schools want the portfolio to be a demonstration of a student’s best work. One simple way to start is to select 2 to 4 assignments for each subject. (That is, for elementary schools, you might have a couple of reading samples, a couple of writing samples, and a couple of math samples; for middle and high schools, you might ask students to include 2 to 4 assignments from each full-year class.)

Some schools focus on a certain subject area; in that case, you might want a sample of each of each type of assignment. For example, a student’s writing portfolio could include a narrative essay, an argumentative essay, and a response to literature; a technology portfolio could show students’ use of word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and Internet research.

A “growth over time” portfolio could include examples of the student doing something similar at different times of the year. For example, we could see a first grader’s ability to read independently at the beginning, middle and end of the year; we could also see a Spanish student’s ability to speak in the language at various points. Sometimes, the growth over time is around some deeper skill; by filming math students working through problems throughout the year, we can see how their problem solving skills grow, or science students could show how their ability to create a good hypothesis has improved from one quarter to the next.

Project-based learning allows us to see the process of building the project, from initial idea through to completed
work. We can see the steps – and the mis-steps – along the way.

The key element when you are getting started is to build on what your teachers and students are already doing. Your students are undoubtedly doing interesting things; the portfolio should allow you to capture those moments.

This is a blog about both ideas and implementation. Since the 1990’s, we’ve learned a great deal about how schools effectively use digital portfolios and other proficiency tools. We’ll share stories of what has worked well for schools, and what might be useful for you.

Ideas: From the beginning, we’ve said that the best educational technology projects start with the education, rather than the technology. How do you want your school to be better? What is it that your school community – students, teachers, parents, administrators – needs? What’s your dream for your school?

Implementation: Turning a vision into a reality is the critical piece in any innovation. We’ve seen schools come up with creative ways of using time, providing training, and communicating plans, and we’ll have posts that let you know what other schools have put in place.

Just so you know, this blog is being written primarily by David Niguidula. If you have your own ideas that you would like to share, or questions you’d like to see addressed, just drop us a line!